Atim Mackin is a PhD student in Romance Languages and Literatures (French) with a secondary field in African and African American Studies. His dissertation, Déjà Vus: The Collective Memory of Sexual Minorities in Francophone Africa, examines the specificity, modalities, and political stakes of narratives of African gender and sexual variance within Francophone contexts, tracing them across French colonial archives, postcolonial literary prose, and asylum-seeking trajectories in metropolitan France.
During the summer 2026 LGBTQI+ Leadership Fellowship, Atim will work with ARDHIS in Paris, assisting LGBTQI+ asylum seekers through language support and legal preparation. This engagement will also inform his research on how stories of sexual and gender persecution circulate between personal testimony, French asylum institutions, and collective memory.